


Adele/Matteo Fluffy Alphabet

by playbychoices



Category: Titanic (Storyscape Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23064658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/playbychoices/pseuds/playbychoices
Summary: 26 chapters for 26 letters, all to tell you how and why I love you.(Letters will be posted out of order)
Relationships: Adele Carrem/Matteo Vasari
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	Adele/Matteo Fluffy Alphabet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Behind support is a sacrifice on both ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most Obvious Inspiration: "Wait for Me" theme within _Hadestown_  
>  \+ This line specifically (playbychoices.tumblr.com/post/188759801961/matteo-vasari-in-my-fic-yearning-adele-my)

* * *

“Adele, my heart, my darling,” Matteo extends both hands to her, “You know the most interesting people.”

“Oh, stop it. You say that like you aren’t already well-aware that I have great taste.” Adele laughs. She sees the policeman behind him. Though both of her feet remain pointed towards Matteo, one of Adele’s feet shifts behind her to form a quasi-defensive stance. “I picked you, didn’t I?” Adele’s hands slip through the bars to hold his as soon as they came close enough. 

Matteo’s hands are eager, holding onto her and then yanking the rest of himself closer to the bars of her cell. He makes an almost happy sound at her joke. It’s nearly a laugh but the sound feels rather choked out of him. His forehead rests on the prison bars. His back is slouched as he looks down at her, his shoulders tense and high. 

Matteo’s dress-shirt is disheveled. The sleeves are rolled up, it has wind-blown rumpled excess out instead of Matteo’s usual slim and tucked-in fit, and the front of it is partially unbuttoned. Adele wonders where his tie is. The restaurant he’s been waiting at had been picky about it, and they could only afford to buy one for the present, so she hopes he knows where it is. But it feels silly to worry over it now, here, by her. To focus on the concern, even just internally, already feels like guilt and denial somehow. 

Matteo traces circles on the backs of Adele’s hands. He’s smiling, but his eyes are sad. His gaze shifts from their hands to make eye-contact with Adele, and Matteo smiles brighter for an instant before dimming again. His mouth opens— a hollowed “I” or “Ah” sound, an incomplete breath, comes out— and then he looks down at their hands again, his mouth closed back into a stiffly practiced smile. His grip tightens around her hands for a moment. 

Finally, he finds the words: “How’d I ever get so lucky is a bit beyond me.” His smile widens to show his teeth. There’s a wet shine to his eyes, and Matteo looks so hopeless and yet hopeful all at once. 

Adele’s not tall enough to press her forehead to his. Adele’s not talented enough at speeches to give him comforting promises she doesn’t truly know if she can fulfill. Adele’s hands are too small to hold all the watery worries Matteo holds in his own. She shifts their hands to intertwine, palm pressed against palm. “ _You_ didn’t. I’m the lucky one.” Adele would be embarrassed at how her voice sounded— Small, nervous, faint. Whining.— if she remembered all the other people that were here in cells and with batons. But, for the moment, she was distracted away from them, from her being in this place. Matteo was here. He _came_.

“Two whole months this time.” Matteo’s eyebrows knit closer and knot the skin separating them. “Two whole _months_ , Adele.” His voice cracks under heavy emotion and then his breath shakes his smile into broken pieces. Before Adele can respond with more than a hurt and apologetic look, Matteo stutters into an attempted laugh. It’s mostly air being pushed out through the gaps between his teeth. “Uhm, Hileni told me to inform you that, and I’m mostly quoting her here: she’s going to go on _sooo_ many dates while you’re gone.”

Adele holds back a quip, _She must be overjoyed_ , and closes her eyes _._ Because Adele knows Matteo will tell her how wrong she is and Adele doesn’t want to ruin this— this fragile roof of domesticity. It’s crumbling around them already, and Adele knows herself to be the cause. If it must crumble, then for Matteo at least, Adele wants it to be made out of sugar. She wants it to be sweet. “You’ll have to pick up the slack and vet those boys while I’m gone.” Adele shifts to stand on her tip-toes to nuzzle her nose with Matteo’s. 

She can feel the pan of Matteo’s breath suck in and stutter against her face, the flutter of his eyelashes close against her forehead. 

Adele whispers to him, eyes fluttering in butterfly kisses, “Very few pass the Carrem standard, you surely know.” Her hands slide down the underside of his forearms,— Matteo shudders— and she pulls on his suspenders to make him lean down further towards her as Adele’s heels find ground again. “It calls for very _exacting_ demands and most men fail spectacularly. You’ll have to be merciless and very fierce with them, Matteo, and I expect a full report of all your terrorizing the next time I see you.“ She teases.

His eyes open slowly as if he’s just waking up (and isn’t that a sight Adele misses already). Matteo’s face is flushed, starving. Adele smiles at him with a quirked brow. But she finds her own cheeks warm traitorously as Matteo’s hands cup her face. His forehead presses against Adele’s, and Matteo’s nose rests on the skin between the side of her own nose and her cheek. 

“What am I supposed to do now, darling?” Matteo sucks in his bottom lip. There are no tears, but the rims of his eyes are red. 

Adele’s eyelashes dust the slopes of Matteo’s face. “Oh, _Teo_.” She worries her bottom lip.

When her eyes are closed, Adele can pretend the prison bars are the bars on their apartment’s windows. She can imagine that Matteo is on the other side of it. He’s on the fire-escape and she opens the window to indulge his Romeo act, despite the window’s bars still separating them. The sweaty and heady smell are the blown-out black puffs from cars driving by. Adele feels sticky from cooking lentils. The impatient tapping of a shoe is Hileni’s foot. And the fantasy eases Adele’s chest in tension.

They don’t kiss. They just hold each other. Adele lets herself pretend it can always be like this, that her whole sentence and her whole life too can pass within this moment.

Adele rubs the pad of her thumbs up and down his suspenders, still in her hands, trying to memorize the texture. Matteo’s hands are so cold on her skin, and this wing of cells is so hot with people’s bodies. His fingers are on her neck, his thumbs on her jawline, his breath is her’s. She’s in his arms, and the sweltering heat in here feels like sunlight suddenly. 

“Darling? _Please_ , tell me what I should do.”

“I love you,” She tells him without looking, “Hold onto that.”

“As if I’d ever let go.” 

“And, in just a couple months, take me home with you.” No tears fall, but she sounds like she’s crying.

Matteo’s voice upticks into the teasing, witty tone Adele learned so well on the Titanic; but knowing him even better in her apartment, Adele recognizes it’s hollowness. It’s a protective mask for him, a try at comforting without pity for her. An attempt to ease her with happy familiarity. “It’ll be the longest damn months of my life, but I’ll put on my Sunday best.” 

He kisses just above her lips, on her cupid’s bow. Not a miss, not a tease. It’s just the closest part of her to him. He’s desperate, distressed, and trying not to show it, even though both his hands are shaking a little as he readjusts his grip to have a firmer hold on her.

It’s good, in a way, that Adele’s desperate to hold onto something of him too. “And we’ll walk. We’ll walk the long way home.” She keeps her eyes closed, tighter, to better imagine, to better hold on.

“Perhaps Hileni will watch dinner warm in the pot for us.”

“It’ll snow.” Adele breathes in sharp realization, her hands tighten around Matteo’s suspenders, fisting some of his shirt as well. “Not the slush kind, but our first _real_ snow in New York, Matteo.”

Adele can feel Matteo’s lips pull into a smile against her cheek. “I’ll have to bring you your good coat,” he says but it sounds like _I love you_ , “And I’ll bring you your scarf too,” _so much_.

“We’ll get mulled wine and fresh gingerbread to split up and share.” Adele kisses the nearest piece of him to her, the side of his nose, and pulls him down closer still. Not close enough. A cell’s bars impede like that, unfortunately. She whispers low enough for just Matteo to hear: “I cannot wait to walk beside you again, my love.”

“Adele, my darling. Adele, my heart. Adal, my good sense,” Matteo’s hands slide down from her face to her neck and collar. The sides of his thumb can feel Adele’s heart race. That there. His face. There’s a smile on his face that takes years off his worried skin. Trauma’s sharp edges draped over with a soft blanket, stress’ creases are pulled and straightened out, and Matteo looks so much like a foolish boy in love with nothing to lose. “Just when I think I couldn’t— You remind me I can still be so endlessly more tender for you. And I, in the most adoring of ways, find you absolutely terrifying for it.”

Adele’s eyes flit open slowly, and her stomach coils when she realizes Matteo has been staring at her for a while now. He sees her. He sees her this close. Yet, he still manages to look at her like that. He loves her. 

Adele’s hand starts to shake a little and she clenches her fists tighter closed around his shirt and suspenders. She tries to scoot her feet closer to him, but the bars are in the way. 

Even like this, even in here, even with an audience, he still loves her so much.

Her flesh flushes— her cheeks, her neck, her nose, her heart— and pink gently washes over her body. Adele’s skin heats up, even more, knowing Matteo can feel warmth bloom under his touch.

Regardless of the gentle embarrassment, there’s a bright pleasure in her eyes. “Wait for me?”

“I will. Infinitely.” Matteo’s eyes shift to the police officer behind him, coming closer. The policeman speaks hushed and roughly, pulling at Matteo’s shoulder to turn and go. Matteo leaves without turning. His hands drop from her like water, running down her shoulders and arms and hands and fingers until both their hands are flexed to hold on by fingertips and nails. He watches her stay as he goes. 

Adele waves sadly at him. 

The voice that comes from Matteo is not his own. Rather, it’s some past version of himself he thought he left to drown, and he calls out to her, “Come home with me, soon.” He says instead of worrying. He says instead of listing the dangers for a Suffragette here in American prisons. He says instead of _Stay alive._ Adele can see wetness flood his eyes, threatening to spill over. He smiles at her, but his voice pleads, “ _Please_.”

Adele tries to seem as undead as she knows how to, “I will, Teo. I’m right behind you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMAGES' CREDIT, all on tumblr: @wildroses, @homesicknis, @artcompilations, @ipwan-ipwan, @medusagirlfriend
> 
> IMAGES' SOURCE CREDIT: _the night rain poet_ \- dorothy porter // _the aeneid_ \- virgil // _can’t help falling in love_ \- elvis presley // _right thru me by nicki minaj_ \- willy monfret // _taking the hands_ \- robert bly
> 
> ORIGINAL STORY'S POST, on tumblr: playbychoices.tumblr.com/post/188747093211/y-e-a-r-n-i-n-g-matteoadele-adele-my-heart
> 
> AO3 services as my back-up account for all my fics on tumblr. I post them there first, and then eventually mass back-up them here. If you want updates on my fics ASAP, send me a message on tumblr to be on my tag-list! I also post fan art there too
> 
> KUDOS ARE VERY KIND BUT REVIEWS MOTIVATE ME


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